Studying in Seville, Spain

As a junior in college, I decided to be "very adventurous" and sign up to study abroad for a semester in Seville (or Sevilla, as it's known in Spanish). I wanted the full immersion experience, so chose a program where I would be directly enrolled in classes at the University of Sevilla and live in a home stay with a Spanish family, who spoke no English.

Foolishly thinking my four years of Spanish had adequately prepared me for this adventure, I set off for Madrid. I took a taxi from the airport to where I was staying and bravely spoke Spanish to the taxi driver. I was so proud of my language skills that when the driver told me the trip would cost 400 pesetas, I confidently counted out 4,000 pesetas for him, and he smiled and drove off!

Life in Spain

After spending 6 weeks in Madrid for orientation classes, the other students on the program and I drove down to Sevilla and split up with our respective home stay families. Fortunately, I lucked out. My placement was with two other Americans in a separate apartment from the family's, as they owned the apartment building. We joined them for lunch and dinner and then could come and go as we pleased.

Getting to know our Spanish family was the most rewarding part of living in Spain. They were warm, welcoming and excellent practice for our Spanish. If you get a chance to live in a home stay anywhere in the world, definitely do it. You won't regret it.

Classes

The most difficult part of the semester was the actual classes. Unfortunately my Spanish level was not nearly high enough to be able to keep up with lecturers in Spanish and take notes at the same time. It's much harder to try to write shorthand in a second language; I usually wound up just writing out whole words because I didn't know how to abbreviate them and when I finally wrote an entire sentence, the professor had moved on. I must admit, I did eventually stop going to classes, as I wasn't getting much out of them.

Though my experience was almost all positive, there were a few negatives worth mentioning, other than not understanding my professors of course. Spain is definitely a macho society and women are slightly better than second class citizens. You can certainly expect to be cat called daily in the streets, stared at, and even groped on occasion (expect this more so if you are fair skinned and have light hair, as I do). Also, even after six months there and my Spanish having improved immensely, I was never treated as a local. People always insisted on trying out their English, even if they barely spoke it. There's a fair bit of bigotry in Spain as well, as I learned when one of my professors made some derogatory remarks about Jews in class! (I did use my broken Spanish to have it out with him over that!).

All in all though a great experience. If you want to improve your Spanish and learn about a new culture, Spain is definitely a great place to study abroad and Seville is a beautiful city - at the very least worthy of a visit.

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BY: Alana

EDITOR'S NOTE: What were your experiences in Spain? - write an article and let us know about it!